North Draws Line At Being The Patsy On Criminal Charges

July 10, 1987|By MAUREEN DOWD, The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- He was willing to take the hit. He was ready to be dropped like a hot rock. He would play the ``fall guy,`` as he put it in his tough-guy lingo, allowing his superiors to finger him on a scheme that was going down the tubes.

But Lt. Col. Oliver L. North would not play the patsy.

``When I heard the words criminal investigation,`` he told the Iran committee on Thursday, ``my mind set changed considerably.``

``There was probably not another person on the planet Earth as surprised as I was to hear that someone thought it was criminal,`` he said. ``And that I was the only person on the planet Earth named on that appointment order.``

North, who has turned the Iran committee hearings into electrifying theater, did not disappoint on Thursday. No longer a flip and combative cowboy blithely bending the law, the colonel now presented himself as the earnest servant of the president, seeking to convince a thickheaded Congress that he was being railroaded.

He had a worthy opponent in Arthur Liman, who clearly felt that he needed to wrest back some of the sympathy North has won this week. The colonel jutted his chin out and the counselor tucked his in. But their combat was subtle and soft-voiced, for the most part, as if Liman had decided he could not win with the aggressive, condescending manner that often characterized his questioning on previous occasions.

North`s lawyer, Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., tried once more to portray his client as the beleaguered victim of congressional bullying. ``Why don`t you get off his back?`` Sullivan snapped at his interrogators.

So Liman cleverly acted the high school principal with the errant schoolboy -- trying to make North see his errors despite the colonel`s continuing protests that he had done nothing illegal or wrong in the diversion of funds to the Nicaragan rebels.

``And have you wondered why, if it was a good idea,`` Liman said, silkily, ``that the president of the United States dismissed you because of it?``

The colonel replied: ``If the commander in chief tells this lieutenant colonel to go stand in the corner and sit on his head, I will do so.``

Liman also asked -- in that sympathetic voice with the edge of the disciplinarian -- why the witness did not confront Rear Adm. John Poindexter upon learning that his boss had not received the approval of the president on memos as he had thought.

``I`m not in the habit of questioning my superiors,`` North replied at one point. ``If he deemed it not to be necessary to ask the president, I saluted smartly and charged up the hill.``

The lawyer spoke to the younger man as though he were giving him a civics lesson.

``And you would agree with the proposition, wouldn`t you, that in our desire to promote democracy abroad, including Nicaragua and elsewhere, we must never sacrifice our democratic values here?`` he asked, as the colonel nodded.

But while Liman may have achieved the impression that North`s superiors were painting him as a ``loose cannon`` to save themselves, North remained protective of his former bosses.

``That is the part of any subordinate,`` he said. ``Every centurion had a group of shields out in front of him -- a hundred of them.``

He said he did not think that the former national security advisers Robert C. McFarlane and Poindexter ``would have ever placed me in jeopardy of a criminal prosecution.``

He said that he was willing to ``take the rap`` in the political arena, but not ``in the criminal courts.``

Liman asked the colonel if he had not winced when he was read the section of the Tower Commission report that quoted the president as saying he knew nothing about the National Security Council staff`s efforts on behalf of the contras.

``I don`t know what you read in my wince,`` North snapped. ``It may have been that my back hurt.``

Liman was at his sharpest, acting appalled and moving in to paint North as very delinquent, when the witness jauntily confessed that he had shredded documents from his files even while the Justice Department officials were in his office collecting files for evidence.

North`s lawyer, Sullivan, testily objected to the committee on the slightest hint that the witness was being bullied -- telling Lyman he was ``in dreamland`` and that, with Congress, fairness was ``out the window.``

Some of the committee members remained immune to the witness`s legendary charm.

``He thought he was a separate secretary of state,`` sniffed Jack Brook, a Texas Democrat.

Sen. William S. Cohen, R-Maine, said he could not accept the idea that North was willing to share critical secrets with Iranian middleman Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, and Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi, but not with such ``true patriots and war heroes`` as Senators Bob Dole of Kansas, the minority leader, and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, the chairman of the select committee.

But others melted under North`s insistence that he was patriot, not profiteer.

``He handled himself very well -- he`s articulate and intelligent and presents himself in a very smooth way in being able to turn questions that should go one way into a more positive vein,`` said Louis Stokes, Democrat of Ohio.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde, R-Ill., called the colonel ``one of those people like Douglas McArthur or FDR . . . you either love him, or hate him. It`s hard to be indifferent.``